Who are you?!

I was walking to my black sedan, using the fob to unlock it, after a Friday night class to go to my job. It was a rainy night, making everything look sleek and more muted behind the steady drops. The double-glass doors had splattered drops blocking reflections. The motion-activated light of the foyer had gone off. I pulled my hoodless jean jacket on as my only defense against the wet, cool air. The streetlight at the corner gave off an orange halo as the only light source. I was the only car that parked in the back lot because it was faster to get to work and because the lot was built at a precarious angle with a steep slope. I assume it was because it was cheaper than leveling out the hill. It probably seemed steeper to me than it was because of my being short. Despite being a petite female, I was used to walking alone after class. The building I had been in was huge and my class was smack in the middle of the first floor. There weren’t even any professors in this lot because they had a reserved lot in the front. I was a little more than halfway to my car, my mind lost in thoughts about papers due and about my mundane-and hopefully temporary hence the night classes- janitorial job. Then suddenly out of my peripheral, I saw him. A guy my age, maybe a little younger but a lot taller. Slim build and skin the color of the perfect latte. He was wearing a white tee shirt and either black jeans or black slacks. He was wearing white sneakers. His black (or wet brown) hair was short and in tight curls. He had freckles on both cheeks. But more importantly, he was holding a knife in his right hand. Not a butcher knife, but a noticeably large pocketknife. The blade’s silver edge gleamed under the streetlight. He wasn’t holding it above his head to attack...at least not yet. It was at his side with the tip facing behind him. He was walking towards me. Not fast, just slowly approaching. His eyes looked dilated and fixated on me. My heart started beating, my stomach had a rock drop in it, and I was trying not to pant out loud. I didn’t look at him straight on and kept darting my eyes between him and my front door. I picked up my speed. The guy didn’t, but he was so tall one of his strides was three of mine. I started to sprint the last steps to my door, and he was right behind me. He didn’t grab at me or yell or stab me. I was able to quickly jump in my car and slam the door closed. He was right outside the driver’s side. I panic-clicked my lock button. I looked up with wide eyes out of my driver side window as I fumbled while putting my key into the ignition. I felt my eyes wanting to cry out of fear. But the guy didn’t try to wrench the door open or break the window. He stood there and I realized he was crying. Tears streaked down his face, and I noticed how red his corneas were around his dark irises. His cheeks and nose were tinted pink from crying. I glanced at his shirt- no blood splatter or stains. Then I saw his lips moving and I focused on listening to him speak. His voice was tight and higher pitched than men’s voices usually are.  

He was repeating “Please, don’t leave. Please, don’t leave. Please, don’t go, please don’t go” over and over.  

I took some choppy breaths and then more quickly than was probably safe on the wet asphalt, I ripped my car into reverse and then sped down the paved slope onto the street without stopping.  

I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw the man standing there still, in the spot next to where my car had been parked.  

“What was that?!” I asked myself out loud as I approached the first stoplight on my way.  

I got to my job without any incident and thought about calling the local hospital and asking if a psych patient had escaped. The thought was nothing more than a ‘pop’ of an idea cloud and I got to work. I worked at a business firm part-time, cleaning at night and on weekends so I could attend classes during the day. Today, there was just no choice for me to pay bills but to work on a night I had class. I was mopping a walkway in the warehouse style two-story basement that had been painted safety green and safety yellow. The bottom floor was storage, and the upper floor was a series of long travel walkways between staircases to get to different sectioned off storage areas. For safety, I had to wear jeans-which I hated-but I could wear any kind of top I wanted. Today, I wore a plain peach tee shirt. There wasn’t good airflow in the basement and with the rain, it felt humid and sticky. Normally, I had my EarPods and cellphone to listen to music or podcasts, but the basement also had absolutely no reception whatsoever, so I never brought them with me when I had to clean down here. 

Suddenly, a voice came over the loudspeaker. 

“HEEHEE, all right ladies and gents, let’s see who can mop up blood faster, clowns or the average cleaning lady” 

It reminded me of Joker, from Batman. I looked up at the ceiling confused and scared. I’m the only one in the building right now. Or I was. My heart started drumming and my breathing became shaky. 

In the storage areas beneath me, the lights came on, making me jump and yelp. I stumbled-ran to the rail-edge of the walkway and looked below me. 

The storage areas now looked like lines of maze lanes and the length of the floors had a red substance, presumably blood, on them. At the end of each lane was a person-some were plain-clothed women and then there were lines of people with mostly plain clothes and white face makeup. Some of them had red-smiles painted over their mouth-areas. Apparently, that’s all you need to be a ‘clown’. 

A second later the loudspeaker gave off a “da-da-da-duun da daaaa”- the sound at a baseball game. Then a gunshot was fired and the people below all started race-mopping up the blood. But they weren’t cleaning it all up, just quickly mopping forward. No buckets of water or anything. 

My eyes scanned with panic at whatever this was and then a clown looked up and made eye contact as he-or she- kept madly mopping. The red-painted smile widened into a grin. 

I felt my stomach drop and sweat begin to drip down me. I wasn’t afraid of clown before now. I ran down the walkway and looked around for an escape. But I was blocked in on both sides by lockers on this walkway and the only way out was to go down the steps to the storage area, go to the other set of stairs and get to the elevator or stair doors that led to the lobby floor. And I wasn’t going down to the storage area for anything.  

My breathing skipped, my heart tried to escape my chest and I felt a tear drip down my cheek. I decided to hide under some mesh against a wall. It was a large mound of fabric that I didn’t know why it was there or what it was for, and I didn’t care. I dove under and squished my knees to my chest and breathed into my jeans to slow it down. The mesh was similar to the Halloween costume mesh that let you see out but was harder to see into; I hoped. I heard the sloshing of mops getting fainter as I presumed the ‘racers’ were moving further down the lanes. I couldn’t see back down the walkway from where I had come from, due to the lockers blocking my view. I became annoyed at those lockers because no one even used them for anything. They had gotten moved down here during recent renovations and the company had decided to wait until next year’s spring clean-up to get rid of them because of it being a more cost-effective option than having them hauled out now. 

A moment later a girl, around my age, came running up the walkway. and slapped her mop to the floor and it made a ‘thud’. I noticed that while it was wet, the mop didn’t have any red on it. She was wearing dark-wash fashion jeans, a dyed-blue jacket, and her blonde hair was in a side ponytail. Her back was to me. She dropped to the ground onto her stomach, now at an angle so I could see the side of her face. She then jabbed her finger to a spot on the floor. A button, perhaps? 

Then a voice came over a speaker-but it wasn’t the loudspeaker...I squinted in confusion. The voice sounded similar to the knife guy in the parking lot. My eyes got wide as I listened. 

“Hmm, yes? Who might this be?” said the voice, somewhat mocking. 

The girl snapped in a stage whisper and was glaring at the floor. “It’s ME! Kim! The one who organized this whole thing! Get me out of here” that was a demand. 

She looked around half-angry, half-nervous. She was holding her upper body up on her elbows, but trying to stay as low as she could. 

“Hmm” came the voice from the floor. There must have been a small speaker there. Or maybe a planted walkies-talkie. “No. Doesn't ring a bell” the voice said a fake-ho-hum tone. 

The girl’s got wide at first and then glared harder at the floor and spoke between her teeth “YOU, get me out of here or so help me....” and she fell flat to the ground. 

I didn’t think my eyes could get any wider, but I was proven wrong as I watched her lay there limp and lifeless. I didn’t hear a gun go off. She just suddenly went ‘splat’. I swallowed nothing because my mouth was dry. I didn’t want to move my head, but my eyes darted between her body and just beyond the locker edge that I could see. I heard the same ‘thud’ again-another mop got tossed to the floor on the sides of the lockers that I couldn’t see. 

Seconds later a guy walked up. He was wearing all black, black work boots, and a brown-leather duster. He had a square head, his brown hair was cut short but not a buzz cut, and he had white face paint that stopped at his chin and sides of his face. His ears and neck were the same color as his skin-light tan. He slowly, menacingly walked to the girl’s body and looked at it for a second. Then he non-nonchalantly turned towards the wall. His face was stoic. He methodically started pressing his hands against the wall, up and down, moving to the side, getting closer and closer to me. 

I held my breath and tried to be a statue- he'd get me if I tried to run. Plus, I was willing to bet that whatever had killed the other girl had a great chance of killing me. But I could see out of the sides of my eye the clown guy was going to touch some part of me when he got to me. Maybe if I didn’t move, he’d touch my hair and think it was just more lump of fabric. My stomach had a boulder doing somersaults in it. I was running out of capacity to hold my breath. I bit my lower lip and squeezed my eyes shut for a second. I was going to die with frizzy hair, in jeans, hiding under mesh in a business firm’s basement. My mind raced with how long it would be before my body was found-it was Friday and I lived alone. I had no boyfriend, and my cellphone and wallet were in my purse in my designated cubby in a closet on the first floor. I hadn’t made any plans because I had to work all weekend, so none of my friends or family were expecting me anywhere. This was a regular-hour business office, so almost no one would be here on the weekend and even if one or two over-achievers did come in, they would just hustle to their offices that were all on the second floor. It would probably be that someone would see my stuff in the cubby closet on Monday and then wonder where I was. Or the company would notice I hadn’t clocked out for 72+ hours. And that was presuming I was left here and not buried in a shallow grave in the woods. 

I was so lost in thought about being found that I jolted and gasped when a hand pressed on my face, and I felt the wall behind me give in a little. The mesh was yanked off and I was staring up at the clown. I just sat there in terror. But the clown guy looked at me and pointed behind me. I slowly looked at him and moved my eyes before my head to look behind me. I figured he was going to bop me with something over the head. But then he stepped next to me and pushed the wall more. It moved more and it led into some kind of tunnel. It was dark except where the walkway light shone a little. It was dusty, lined with cobwebs and smelled like must and rust. I looked from inside the hidden tunnel to the clown guy. He moved his head slightly toward me and silently pointed into the tunnel. 

 I swallowed and slowly stood up but had to bend back down to go inside. He followed me and when he was inside, he moved the wall back into place and it was black except for spaces here and there along the way. My eyes were trying to adjust to the dark when suddenly a light came on at my feet. I jumped back and looked up. The clown was holding a flashlight. He pointed it on the ground down the tunnel and started moving. He pointed again when he got right behind me. Not seeing much choice, I turned and went first down the tunnel, trying to keep my eyes where the flashlight illuminated. It was a only few minutes that felt like forever when I saw a big, brighter fluorescent glow ahead of me. I walked closer to it and when I got up to it, I blinked a couple times. 

Then I focused on three figures in front of me. One looked like Morpheus from the Matrix and the other was thin woman with a short black bob, dressed in black with white face paint. She had her head tilted and her eyes looked empty. Between them was the knife guy from the parking lot. 

He wasn’t crying now; he was smiling an eerie smile and his black eyes looked soft but focused on me. He was wearing a white tuxedo with a black undershirt and had a small rose in his breast pocket. He outreached his arms to me and took two of his long strides towards me. I just stood there flat-footed and confused. The fear ran through me as he pulled me into a hug. 

“Ahh” he said, sounding relieved “I’m so glad you made it. I was so worried” but he didn’t sound kind. He sounded...kind of condescending. Or sarcastic. I wasn’t sure, but it felt off, nonetheless. I didn’t return the embrace, but he didn’t seem to notice or mind. He released and pulled back, his palms resting on my shoulders. He looked me over with a too-sweet smile. He grabbed my hand and pulled me into some office I’d never seen before. I got pulled into his chest from behind. I let out a squeak. The clown guy with the flashlight emerged from the tunnel and hit a button on the side of the wall inside the office and the tunnel wall closed. 

My eyes were looking around and my pulse could match any Olympian's. 

The knife guy, said softly into my ear “Now we never have to be apart again, my love” 

My stomach rolled again; I didn’t know who this guy was or what was going on. Apparently, I was the target of this psycho secret admirer. He pulled my hand, and we all went out of the office door onto the rainy street. There were two cars; a black sedan that looked like mine, only newer, and a black SUV. The two clowns and matrix man went to the SUV and the knife guy opened the driver’s door and gestured for me to get in, which I did. He closed the door for me-what a gentleman? - and then got in the passenger side. He handed me keys. 

“We can go home now, love” he sing-sang to me. “I know you know how to drive this car” he smiled that sickly-sweet smile again. 

I put the car into drive. I didn’t know where to go. He’d probably know if I wasn’t going to my apartment. He might get mad and attack me if I tried to go to the police station. 

I swallowed and nervously looked at him. He was leaning into kiss me. I panicked, a cold sweat overtaking me. I was scared and started crying, and not knowing what else to do, I screamed. 

I screamed myself awake. I was lying in my bed, still in a cold sweat, panting. 

It had been a terrifying dream.